V-Man was a part of European Union's Framework 5 IST programme. Glasgow University collaborated with our EU partners who contributed to this work: CS-SI, CSTB, HD Thames, MathEngine and Sail Labs.The V-Man project has developed an intuitive authoring and intelligent system to create, animate, control and interact in real-time with a new generation of 3D virtual characters: the V-Men . It combines several innovative algorithms coming from Virtual Reality, Physical Simulation, Computer Vision, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Given a high-level task like "walk to that spot" or "get that object", a V-Man generates the complete animation required to accomplish the task. V-Men synthesise motion at runtime according to their environment, their task and their physical parameters, drawing upon its unique set of skills manufactured during the character creation. The key to the system is the automated creation of realistic V-Men which was developed in glagow, not requiring the expertise of an animator. It is based on real human data captured by 3D static and dynamic body scanners, which is then processed to generate firstly animatable body meshes, secondly 3D garments and finally skinned body meshes.
Fig 1. Crowds
Fig 2. Example of Interactive Animation Authoring